"Strategic Planning" sounds so cognitive and conceptual. And, this is how most organizations treat it, unfortunately. However, when done correctly, strategy work operates in a completely different realm - the realm of emotion and action.
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We now understand a great deal about what differentiates the successful leader from the under-performing one. Successful people are aggressive learners. The bad news is that only about 10% of us are by nature agile learners. The good news, though, is that much of what it takes to be an aggressive learner is coachable.
It's no secret that over the last ten years or so virtually every business and every working person has been buffeted by constant and relentless transitional - and, at times, even transformational - forces. However, the key to competitive advantage in these tumultuous times is still not broadly acknowledged.
Every new hire will ultimately contribute either to moving your business forward or to holding it back. So, why handicap your organization's competition for talent by not exploiting the most advanced technology available for selecting the strongest candidates and for avoiding costly selection errors?« Read more
What do you do when one day, you're half a dozen partners - a band of merry men and women - and then, seemingly overnight, you've surpassed some sort of critical mass and become a not so intimate group of 100 or 1,000 partners and counting, in a fast-growing, hard-charging, entrepreneurially driven professional service firm?« Read more
If people are truly the primary resource of a company, as most organizations assert, then they must be managed and developed like other assets. That is, every person is like an individual portfolio with a strong potential for either managed growth or sub-par performance.
Caution: Career Derailment Ahead
Why do executives, managers and professionals either derail or flounder and then get shunted off to roles that are out of the mainstream? Typically, it's because they have a psychological blind spot that is all too visible to others.
Changing an organization - changing a human system - is, at its heart, a process of finding and then using organizational levers. Mastering the change process is about identifying an array of organizational levers and then taking advantage of these levers' multiplier effects. « Read more
As organizations move through the new millennium, they are more keenly aware than ever of the primary challenge of our age: mastering "permanent white water" (i.e., change) in order to remain competitive.
With just a little forethought, the typical approach to performance management can be transformed into a stratgic cornerstone of the organization's effectiveness. This schematic clearly outlines the key elements.